In The Fundamentals of Ethics, Russ Shafer-Landau spends a chapter focusing on act utilitarianism, a version of consequentialism. In the chapter he discusses the structure of act utilitarianism and its principle of maximizing goodness. He also provides some of the attractions of Utilitarianism and the scope of Utilitarianism. What I plan to focus on however is the Utilitarian view of moral knowledge and the problem of using expected results over actual results when committing moral actions.
According to utilitarians, when committing moral acts, we are morally required to choose the act that creates the greatest net balance of happiness over unhappiness (Shafer-Landau, 121). In their opinion this is what brings about the best overall situation. This means that the right action to commit is always the one that brings about the best results; regardless of how long the results may take to actually occur (Shafer-Landau, 121). This creates a problem when it comes to choosing the right action to do, as Shafer-Landau explains (Shafer-Landau, 121). Should the morality of actions depend on their actual results or should they depend on their expected results? Some utilitarians take the standard view and say that the morality of actions depend on their actual results (Shafer-Landau, 122). Regardless if it is intended to be or not, if an action is not optimific, meaning that it does not yield the greatest balance of benefits over drawback, then it is not the right action according to the standard view. Other utilitarians take the opposing view and say that the morality of actions depends on their expected results. According to these Utilitarians, an action is morally required because it is expected to be optimific and therefore is right (Shafer-Landau, 122).
If we take the view that the rightness of an action depends on its expected results rather than its actual results then we would be creating two problems according to Shafer-Landau: it will require actions that could possibly yield disastrous results, and it could make us refrain from choosing actions that we might expect to turn out badly but end up bringing about good results (Shafer-Landau, 123). Although these are two serious problems, I still believe that an action should depend on its expected results rather than its actual results. If my actions depended on their actual results than I would never, for example, be able to help anyone in need. Take Singer's argument that it is morally required to give to poverty and say that we all abide to it and do end up helping a country that is suffering from poverty. That seems like we did the right thing doesn't it? Now let's say that country that we helped alleviate its poverty becomes economically sufficient and starts to build up its countries army and plans to start the next World War III. This is a bad thing and according to the standard view the right action is not helping alleviate that countries poverty. What I am hinting at is that if we are to take the standard view and choose actions that bring about the best actual result then we will never know what we should do because the standard view requires us to know about the future of our actions. Who's to say that country whose poverty that we alleviated ends up not starting World War III and instead brings about World Peace? As we've seen before future sometimes changes its course.
Me personally I can't live with the idea of not helping someone at the moment because they could possibly bring about harm. I'm human and I'm not equipped with the gift of omniscience, all I know is what is happening now and if my gut instinct says that I should act now on something than that's what I will do. I would rather live with knowing that my intentions of helping someone or doing something were good and it ended up not being good as opposed to not helping someone or not doing something good and hope that my decision was right.
I agree with DJ. We should measure someone's goodness by the intention of their actions and not the actual result. If we measured goodness by actual results bad people could be considered good and vice versa, which could cause someone to trust the wrong person. For example, a bad person could try be trying to create a harmful chemical but could accidentally create a cure for cancer or another disease. Yes, the result was a good thing, but his intentions were bad and this one accidental good result does not change the man from bad to good. Vice Versa, a person could be trying to make a cure for cancer, but instead makes a harful medicine with bad side effects. This is similar to the movie I Am Legend. The person that created the cure for cancer accidentally created a a medicine that nearly wiped out society. This does not make her a bad person, just someone who had a bad accidental result.
ReplyDeletePhil writes, "If we measured goodness by actual results bad people could be considered good and vice versa, which could cause someone to trust the wrong person. For example, a bad person could try be trying to create a harmful chemical but could accidentally create a cure for cancer or another disease. Yes, the result was a good thing, but his intentions were bad and this one accidental good result does not change the man from bad to good."
DeleteBut there are some confusions here. Above all, remember that consequentialism is a theory about what makes an *action* right or wrong. It is not a theory about what makes a *person* good or bad. This is what I meant by saying in class that consequentialism's moral assessments of actions should *not be taken personally.* So the actual results version of utilitarianism can AGREE with everything you say above. A bad person trying to do a bad thing may accidentally cause the best possible results. When the actual consequences utilitarian says that he *did the right thing*, this is not to say that this *makes him a good person*. All it means, really, is that it's a good thing that action was performed. And vice versa. When a good person tries to do a good thing and circumstances unfortunately go awry, the conclusion that she did the wrong thing does not mean that she is a bad person. The world would, after all, be better if she hadn't done what she did - and that's all the actual consequences utilitarian is saying when she says that the person's action was wrong.
There are reasons to be dissatisfied with these answers, but they are subtle theoretical reasons rather than objections to the moral conclusions entailed by the theory.